Three things to cultivate

From: Unfettered Questions (UQ04)

Audio

Speaker: This question is from Rich in Buffalo, New York.

I started a daily meditation practice of twenty to thirty minutes (now thirty to forty minutes) last May. These meditations have been focused on the cultivating attention material from Wake Up To Your Life. I was about to start the impermanence and death meditations in Wake Up To Your Life, when I listened to the first podcast on the four immeasurables. After listening to the podcast, I was inspired to start meditating with the equanimity material, the four lines from the podcast. My question is, whether it is okay to stay with the four immeasurables meditations, or should I start on the death and impermanence meditations?

Ken: Well, there're many facets to this question. The first is, there are many, many different meditations in Buddhism and it can be difficult to know "Which meditation I should do now?" or "What should my practice be?" and so forth. And this is one of the reasons why it's very helpful to have someone with whom you can talk about your practice on a regular basis, a teacher who has the experience, knows what is helpful, and can guide you. 

That's not always possible. And so many people are left to their own devices, so to speak. One of the things that I've found helpful was written by a twelfth or thirteenth century teacher in the Shangpa Kagyu tradition, a person called Kyergongpa, who said that there are really only three things you need to cultivate in practice of Buddhism. Understanding of impermanence, compassion, and devotion as a way into insight. We can call these the three great doors. And we find this going right back to the very roots of Buddhism in the Theravada tradition. We have the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, and non-self. And these three doors correspond exactly to that. Impermanence, of course, is impermanence. There's an intimate relationship with cultivating compassion and opening to the suffering of the world, and understanding that life--ordinary existence--is suffering. It's a constant reaction to experience. And devotion, insight, non-self are all connected. It is by developing a high level of emotional energy through such practices--devotion--that we come to be able to see that there is no thing which we are. There are other approaches, of course, but that's one of them. So in this sense, those are the three important elements.

What I've also found is that, you practice any one of these deeply enough, and you find yourself cultivating the other two. So that, for instance, with impermanence, as we cultivate a deeper and deeper appreciation that there is nothing which doesn't change--that we ourselves are going to die, and we don't know when that's going to happen--we come to understand that we're not the only ones in that situation. Everybody else is in exactly the same situation. And we begin to see how much energy we and other people pour into what are really not very important things in the light of death--in the end of our lives. And as we go even deeper into that, we cultivate a natural relationship with compassion by contemplating impermanence. And if we go deeper into that, we begin to enter into the mystery of being itself. There isn't anything which is constant, and yet all of this experience keeps arising. And yet there seems to be nothing to it. So we begin to open to insight. And an appreciation, which often takes the form of devotion, begins to arise for the teachings, which lead us into this wonderful experience of the mystery of being.

Or we can start with compassion. And as we relate more and more deeply with compassion--which is what the practices of the four immeasurables naturally leads to--as we relate more deeply with compassion, we begin to see that everybody is caught up in suffering. And people are caught up in suffering because they try to hold onto what is by nature impermanent. So we see our meditation on compassion, our cultivation of compassion leads us into an understanding of impermanence. And it also leads us into an understanding of non-self. Because we come to see that the only thing to be, the only thing that we are, in the end, is an ongoing response, rather than a reaction, to the suffering that arises in the world.

And we can start with non-self or devotion. Because as we come to see that there is no thing that we are, we naturally see that everything is impermanent, everything is constantly changing. And we naturally see that people are caught up into holding onto things that they don't need to hold onto.

So these are the three great doors in Buddhism, and if you go deeply enough, any one of them will take you through all of them. So, as we've discussed a couple of times in these questions, Buddha said, we have to work out our own freedom. So we find the practices which really speak to us, which really help us to become more present, to bring more balance into our experience. And those we work very, very deeply. And that, I find, is the best way to approach things.

The Self

On the Unfettered Mind Ning discussion forum about people's favorite passage from Ken's podcasts, Jim Ellsworth wrote the following:

Reply by Jim Ellsworth on April 5, 2009 at 12:07am

Ann...Here's a zinger from the Power and Presence #5 podcast (about 35 minutes in):

"Everybody’s trying to get rid of the self. You know, we have this little thing in Buddhism called the “non-self.” Can you get rid of something that doesn’t exist? Can you wake up a person who’s pretending to be asleep? One way of looking at the “self,” it is a fiction that arises as a way to give the appearance of continuity and rationality to what is actually a long series of random events."

A few minutes later, Jeff suggested that "response to the environment" was a better choice of words than "random events," to which Ken agreed. I find letting go of the "self" by opening into a simple, yet completely full, experience of the present moment to be the heart of practice. It's still so hard to trust that this moment is all there is.

And here is the corresponding clip (with an extra minute added):

The Self (from Power and Presence (retreat) 00:35:06.00 - 00:37:26.70)

(download into iTunes)

Progression

Progression (from TAN16 Then and Now (class) 00:57:47.50 - 01:03:52.00) (download into iTunes)

Ken: Most of you here, and I know you have, Susan, have been exposed to teachings of mahamudra and dzogchen. These are advanced teachings, even they're given out to all kinds of people. But a lot of people who receive them don’t appreciate their subtlety or where they fit in the progression that I'm describing.

I can describe the progression in another way and that is in terms of attachment to ideas about the world.

So, we start off, think, well, you know, life isn’t bad, but I'm having a certain kind of difficulty and if I could just learn a few skills then everything would just be great, you know. If I could learn not to react so much, then my life would be great. So, sit down and learn how to meditate. And it's true. I learn how not to react so much. But in the process of learning how not to react which is basically letting go of thoughts and feelings as facts and just experience them as thoughts and feelings.

In developing that ability we become aware of a much deeper problem. That all of that reactivity is organized around a sense of self, and serves to protect that sense of self. And so we go, "Ah, there's more of a bigger problem here, didn't realize this. Well if I could just let go of the sense of self, you know, then I wouldn't react at all. That'd be so cool."

So, now meditation and one's practice takes on a different tenor. And you begin to develop not just a calm mind, a mind which is less reactive, but you also develop a certain ability to see into the nature of things because an intellectual understanding that there is no self doesn't change anything as you well know. It has to be a direct experience. So you're beginning to move into the realm of direct experience and direct awareness, which is a beginning to approach rigpa and awareness and all of those things. And so, you come to a point where you go, “Wow, I don’t exist as a thing.” Then, that’s a very definite experience. Some people say, “That’s totally cool,” some people say, "This freaks me out.” People have different reactions to that experience. But, it opens up more possibilities.

But again, it reveals a deeper problem. And that is "Well, if I don’t exist as a thing, then what is all this? And where does confusion arise? And where does being awake arise? If there's no entity which is me what do all of these things mean?" That's a really difficult question. This leads to another level of exploration which is basically what bodhicitta, and mahamudra, and dzogchen, middle way is more bodhicitta, are about is: there is just this experience which is simultaneously vivid and empty. When one can actually experience that moment to moment in a completely non-conceptual awareness that's what you're calling rigpa. That's what mahamudra and dzogchen. Now, that's the progression as a progressive letting go of more and more.

This Gampopa's writing when you get The Perfection of Wisdom you'll see he does write about mahamudra and matyamaka. He doesn't write explicitly about dzogchen. It's implicit in this approach but here this is a path, a graded path, a step-by-step path where the dzogchen and mahamudra teachings in the vadjrayana take the perspective this is present in us right now. It doesn't have to be grown, you don't have to go through a process, you can relate to it right now. That’s a different approach. It's a very effective approach. And usually in the Tibetan tradition one worked with both approaches simultaneously because there were abilities that needed to be cultivated, as you well know, one has to have a certain ability in attention otherwise one simply can't practice dzogchen. One can think one's practicing dzogchen but you're not. That's where a lot of people are today. Does this answer your question?